Climategate and the Big Green Lie

By way of preamble, let me remind you where I stand on climate
change. I think climate science points to a risk that the world needs
to take seriously. I think energy policy should be intelligently
directed towards mitigating this risk. I am for a carbon tax. I also
believe that the Climategate emails revealed, to an extent that
surprised even me (and I am difficult to surprise), an ethos of
suffocating groupthink and intellectual corruption. The scandal
attracted enormous attention in the US, and support for a new energy
policy has fallen. In sum, the scientists concerned brought their own
discipline into disrepute, and set back the prospects for a better
energy policy.

I had hoped, not very confidently, that the
various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This
would have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the
scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best
they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently
incompetent and even wilfully wrong. The climate-science establishment,
of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems
entirely incapable of understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it
has done to its own cause.

The Penn State inquiry
exonerating Michael Mann -- the paleoclimatologist who came up with
"the hockey stick" -- would be difficult to parody. Three of four
allegations are dismissed out of hand at the outset: the inquiry
announces that, for "lack of credible evidence", it will not even
investigate them. (At this, MIT's Richard Lindzen tells the committee,
"It's thoroughly amazing. I mean these issues are explicitly stated in
the emails. I'm wondering what's going on?" The report continues: "The
Investigatory Committee did not respond to Dr Lindzen's statement.
Instead, [his] attention was directed to the fourth allegation.")
Moving on, the report then says, in effect, that Mann is a
distinguished scholar, a successful raiser of research funding, a man
admired by his peers -- so any allegation of academic impropriety must be
false.

You think I exaggerate?

This level of
success in proposing research, and obtaining funding to conduct it,
clearly places Dr. Mann among the most respected scientists in his
field. Such success would not have been possible had he not met or
exceeded the highest standards of his profession for proposing
research...

Had Dr. Mann's conduct of his research been outside
the range of accepted practices, it would have been impossible for him
to receive so many awards and recognitions, which typically involve
intense scrutiny from scientists who may or may not agree with his
scientific conclusions...

Clearly, Dr. Mann's reporting of his
research has been successful and judged to be outstanding by his peers.
This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his
work been outside of accepted practices in his field.

In
short, the case for the prosecution is never heard. Mann is asked if
the allegations (well, one of them) are true, and says no. His record
is swooned over. Verdict: case dismissed, with apologies that Mann has
been put to such trouble.

Further "vindication" of the Climategate emailers was to follow, of course, in Muir Russell's equally probing investigation.
To be fair, Russell manages to issue a criticism or two. He says the
scientists were sometimes "misleading" -- but without meaning to be (a
plea which, in the case of the "trick to hide the decline", is an
insult to one's intelligence). On the apparent conspiracy to subvert
peer review, it found that the "allegations cannot be upheld" -- but, as
the impressively even-handed Fred Pearce
of the Guardian notes, this was partly on the grounds that "the roles
of CRU scientists and others could not be distinguished from those of
colleagues. There was 'team responsibility'." Edward Acton,
vice-chancellor of the university which houses CRU, calls this
"exoneration".

I am glad to see The Economist, which I criticized for making light of the initial scandal, taking a balanced view of these unsatisfactory proceedings. My only quarrels with its report are quibbles. For instance, in the second paragraph it says:

The reports conclude that the science of climate is sound...

Actually, they don't, as the article's last paragraph makes clear:

An
earlier report on climategate from the House of Commons assumed that a
subsequent probe by a panel under Lord Oxburgh, a former academic and
chairman of Shell, would deal with the science. The Oxburgh report,
though, sought to show only that the science was not fraudulent or
systematically flawed, not that it was actually reliable. And nor did
Sir Muir, with this third report, think judging the science was his job.

Like
Pearce, The Economist rightly draws attention to the failure of the
Russell inquiry to ask Phil Jones of the CRU whether he actually
deleted any emails to defeat FoI requests. It calls this omission
"rather remarkable". Pearce calls it "extraordinary". Myself, I would
prefer to call it "astonishing and indefensible". I don't see how,
having spotted this, the magazine can conclude that the report,
overall, was "thorough, but it will not satisfy all the critics."
(Well, the critics make such unreasonable demands! Look into the
charges, they say. Hear from the other side. Ask the obvious questions.
It never stops: you just can't satisfy these people.)

However, The Economist is calling for the IPCC's Rajendra Pachauri to go. That's good.

So where does this leave us? Walter Russell Mead
is always worth reading on this subject, and I usually agree with him
-- but I think his summing up in this case is not quite right.

Greens
who feared and climate skeptics who hoped that the rash of
investigations following Climategate and Glaciergate and all the other
problems would reveal some gaping obvious flaws in the science of
climate change were watching the wrong thing. The Big Green Lie (or
Delusion, to be charitable) isn't so much that climate change is
happening and that it is very likely caused or at least exacerbated by
human activity. The Big Lie is that the green movement is a source of
coherent or responsible counsel about what to do.

He's
right, of course, that the green movement is not trusted as an adviser
on what to do. So what? Its counsel on policy is not required. Nor, for
that matter, is a complex international treaty of the sort that
Copenhagen failed to produce. Congress and the administration can get
to the right policy -- an explicit or implicit carbon tax; subsidies
for low-carbon energy -- without the greens' input, so long as public
opinion is convinced that the problem is real and needs to be
addressed. It's not the extreme or otherwise ill-advised policy
recommendations of the greens that have turned opinion against action
of any kind, though I grant you they're no help. It's the diminished
credibility of the claim that we have a problem in the first place.
That is why Climategate mattered. And that is why these absurd
"vindications" of the climate scientists involved also matter.

The
economic burdens of mitigating climate change will not be shouldered
until a sufficient number of voters believe the problem is real,
serious, and pressing. Restoring confidence in climate science has to
come first. That, in turn, means trusting voters with all of the doubts
and unanswered questions -- with inconvenient data as well as data that
confirm the story -- instead of misleading them (unintentionally, of
course) into believing that everything is cut and dried. The inquiries
could have started that process. They have further delayed it.

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